


stedfast as thou art

by kirazi



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: (whichever canon you prefer), F/M, Post-Canon, There Was Only One Bedroll, hedge knights, mostly feelings, soft marrieds sleeping on the hard ground, with some minor detours into Westerosi astronomy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:01:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28475850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kirazi/pseuds/kirazi
Summary: The moon is a bare crescent, hung low above the branches, and her hair is the brightest thing down here on the ground.(Jaime and Brienne, one night on the road, some years after the war.)
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Comments: 60
Kudos: 172
Collections: JB Festive Festival Exchange 2020





	stedfast as thou art

**Author's Note:**

  * For [potato_writes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/potato_writes/gifts).



> Dear potato_writes, sorry to be skating in under the wire with posting! Happy New Year, and I hope you enjoy these 2021 words. I combined the prompts "underneath the stars" and "established long-term relationship," with an echo of the song you also prompted, and this is what came out on the other side. Apparently I only write them this soft when they're outside on the hard ground. Title from Keats's "Bright Star,” including the spelling.

Jaime’s not sure what noise it is that wakes him—maybe an owl in the trees, or a fox moving somewhere through the undergrowth—but it wakes him slow and gentle, so his soldier’s instinct knows it’s not a threat. He opens his eyes to a clear dark sky, framed with the black bones of branches, and rolls to his side, burying his nose at the nape of Brienne’s neck. Her night-cool hair is slippery against his jaw, and there’s something indefinite he treasures about the way she smells there, just where her neck meets her shoulder. She sighs in her sleep, and he nestles closer, wrapping his arms around her. He likes it better the other way around, with the cradling heat of her all along his back, but he’s content to have it this way too. It’s better than sleeping alone.

The woolen bedroll is the only thing between them and the bare ground, but they’re warm, even in the night’s chill, with a bearskin draped around them both. Brienne had killed the bear, almost a year ago. She’d taken its neck out while Jaime shouted uselessly from too far a distance; it had been gasping out its last bloody breaths at her feet by the time he’d finally reached her side, his own chest heaving. The memory of that moment has never settled, quite—the astonishing admixture of terror and triumph he’d felt. He blinks it away, shifts until the great spangled bowl of the sky occupies most of his vision. The moon is a bare crescent, hung low above the branches, and her hair is the brightest thing down here on the ground. Jaime noses the back of her neck again, unable to help himself, and she makes a tiny contented snort in her sleep, a sound that fills him with warmth. He likes having her company to himself, selfish though it is—in the ranks of his sins, that one is minor. There’s no one for miles around, or at least no one without wings or hooves or horns. Halfway between two of the smaller settlements at the edge of the Riverlands, traveling well off the main road—they haven’t seen so much as a lone trader for the past two days. It’s not unusual, in the life they’ve made together during winter’s slow retreat.

They’d found themselves wandering, after the all the wars finally came to their ultimate and bloody conclusion. The Starks couldn’t abide Jaime’s continuing presence at her side, and he couldn’t abide the prospect of returning to King’s Landing, a burned, haunted ruin of a city, with his brother, or the prospect of pointless quest to rebuild an abandoned Casterly Rock atop its empty mines. And Brienne had received the grim news from Tarth—the island sacked, her father dead, the survivors scattered along the Stormlands coast—with a quiet, dignified heartbreak that it still pains him to recall. She’d refused Gendry Baratheon’s offer to retake it for her. So they’d taken to the road, instead, wandering across the Riverlands and the Crownlands, from the Neck to the Reach and back, helping put an end to the little problems of the peace wherever they could: an errant shadowcat here, a pack of roving bandits there. Pod had wandered with them for the first two years, before marrying and taking his bride home to his family’s hall in the Westerlands, with a promise to return to Brienne’s service should she ever settle in a place where a bannerman with a family to raise might hope to reside.

Brienne shifts in his arms, waking, as she often does when he’s alert and alone with his thoughts in the small hours of the night. He’s never understood how she senses it, no matter how carefully he stills his limbs—something in the changing pattern of breaths, perhaps. It happens the other way around, too, when she’s having a nightmare: he'll wake in time to rouse her from those dreams before she utters a sound.

“It’s colder,” she says, voice slow and rough with sleep, and he smiles. “I think it might rain.” She might be right about that—there’s mist in the trees, and the suggestion of a cloud front topping the hills behind them. The weather has grown quite unpredictable of late.

“You’re the one who said we needn’t set up the tent,” he reminds her, fondly.

“I wanted to see the stars,” she says, still half-mumbling, and yawns, shifting onto her back and opening her eyes to the sky.

“And they’ve made a fine display for you,” he tells her, pointing. “There’s the Sow, and the Shadowcat, and the Crone’s Lantern.” She knows the constellations as well as he does—better, with her childhood of seaward skies—but she lets him prattle on.

“I think that’s the Moonmaid’s top half,” he continues. “Or maybe it’s her bottom.”

Brienne chuckles and kicks his ankle under the furs, and wrestles an arm free until her finger is alongside his, angled a little further to the south and the west.

“There,” she says, softly. “You can see the whole of her from the Stormlands. Her right foot points the way to the evening star. When I was a child, they would tell us it was a ball she’d dropped and kicked away, and could never catch again.”

Jaime thinks about stars, and titles, and everything she’d left behind, stranded and lost across a strait in the Narrow Sea. She’d spoken of Tarth only rarely in their first year on the road, but as time went on, the ground beneath them unfreezing and softening and sending up new shoots, she’d started telling him small memories like this one, little stories about the place she comes from.

“I once heard a maester in Oldtown say that the evenstar isn’t a star at all,” he tells her, not knowing what else to say. “It’s a whole world, like this one. Like the Seven Wanderers.” It sounds improbable to him, but he’s no maester: how should he know? He’s slower to discount improbable things than he’d once been, now that he’s seen dragons and White Walkers, now that he’s alive and happy in a world where his sister and their children are dead, and where he’s abandoned every office and title he’d been raised and trained to hold. He’s just a hedge knight, now, albeit one with a Valyrian steel sword, and a true knight for a companion, with one of her own.

“If it’s not a star, how does it shine?” she asks, and he smiles. Always attuned to the practical side of things, she is, whether on the ground or in the sky.

“It catches the light of the sun, and sends it back on us,” he says. “Or so he argued, at great length and in elaborate detail.” He thinks about it for a second. “Maybe that world’s an icy wasteland. White as the bloody North.”

“Not any longer,” Brienne reminds him. “It’s spring even in the North, now. Sansa’s last letter said the snows were melted nearly all the way to the Wall, and the crocuses blooming at Winterfell.”

He wonders, again, whether she still wishes she could be there to see them, still stand at her lady’s side. He’d lost his family, and he’d taken her away from the one she’d found a place in. “Maybe we can finally stray past the Neck, then,” he says, mostly in jest. But he’d do it, for her sake, no matter how many times he’s sworn never to set foot there again. Assuming he could make it further than Moat Cailin without an arrow in his throat. Brienne is still revered in the North, but not even her good word buys him more than the barest of paroles in any place where Winterfell rules sovereign.

She’s silent for a long moment, and then she says, “Jaime, I want to go home.” For a moment, there’s no sound but their breathing, and the wind whispering through the branches above.

“A bed might be nice,” he says eventually—his tone deliberately light, but he mostly means it. His joints creak more loudly with each passing year, and his bones start to ache after they’ve gone too many weeks without a stay in an inn. Also, it would be nice to fuck without dressing again right after. Brienne refuses to sleep unclothed in the outdoors no matter how far from any road or settlement they stray, and he acknowledges it as good sense while mourning the absence of her skin against his, sleepy and sated, in the aftermath.

“I’m not sure I can promise a bed. Evenfall must be half a ruin, now, and the western shores riddled with pirate coves. I don’t know if any of the fishermen or farmers have gone back or how they’re faring, or what it would take to rebuild. They may not welcome lords or ladies at all. Even if they did, I don’t know where I’d start.”

“Well—money,” Jaime says. “We could apply to the Crown, you know. They have an interest in seeing Tarth restored to order and trade.” He pauses. “Also, technically, I may still be the heir to a fortune. I haven’t actually bothered to ask Tyrion whether there’s any money left, or what he’s done with it.” He and his brother don’t exchange letters often—only enough to assure one another that each is still living. He’s not sure he’s ready for that to change, but he’d go to the trouble of finding out, for Brienne.

“It’s your fortune,” she says, stubborn. “Or it belongs to the Westerlands. Not mine. Not Tarth’s.”

“We _are_ wed,” he reminds her. They haven’t done it formally, standing before a septon, with cloaks exchanged and the vows they’d both been raised with recited. But sometime well into that second year of wandering, they’d stumbled across a stray young weirwood tree—hardly more than a sapling—nearly a day’s ride south of Moat Cailin. It had been easy enough to kneel before it and say the words that mattered, easier somehow to do when they were borrowing someone else’s traditions halfway. Podrick had stood as witness, his smile wider than Jaime had ever seen it, at least until the day Brienne had knighted him. Jaime can’t remember anymore precisely what words he’d found, on his knees under those bright branches, but he knows _I am hers_ was part of it. Whatever he has, that too is hers. He hopes she knows that as well as she knows the weight of a blade in her hand.

Brienne is quiet again. “I might not be able to stand it,” she says, finally. “I might want to turn around and sail straight for the mainland.”

He shrugs. “Then we’ll see what need the Stormlands have for two good blades. I imagine we’ll find enough to keep us busy.”

“It’s a long voyage with an uncertain end,” she says, and then, more softly: “I don’t know if you’d like it there.”

Jaime recalls the view from a ship’s rail, the shock of vivid green against the variable blues of sky and seawater. A peaceful-looking place, even though he knows better than to think so. He props himself up on a elbow so she can see as much of his face as the moonlight allows.

“You want to go home,” he tells her. “Well, so do I, and it's rare luck for me, because my home is you. If that’s on Tarth, I expect I’ll like it very well, so long as you’re there, and happy.”

She doesn’t say anything to that, just curls her hand into his and shifts them around on the bedroll until his head is resting on her shoulder, warm through the linen of her shirt. That’s answer enough, now that he's able to hear what she says with her body instead of with words. Jaime tilts his face up to kiss the corner of her mouth, and feels her smile. He settles in, drowsy and content, and thinks: _the stars are bright at sea_.


End file.
